“You should’ve let me stitch you first,” I say. “You used your kit on me.”
“I’ll be fine.” She shrugs. “Can’t have you walking around with holes in you.”
“It was just a scratch.”
“That bullet said otherwise.”
I pull the wound together with the strips. She winces and I mutter an apology. She lets it pass.
I keep stealing glances at her and it doesn’t feel like a choice. My eyes go to her without even trying.
“You seeing anyone?” I ask, trying for casual but it lands like a grenade between us.
“Who has time for that when there are contracts to collect?” She takes a sip of beer, hiding in the motion.
I finish the bandage. “Turn around.”
She obeys without biting my head off. That alone says too much.
I take her wrist and she faces me. Her eyes lock onto mine as I clean the burn from her newly ruined sigil. Her skin is warm and I want to press my lips to the softness here.
My own scarred-over sigil sits opposite hers, the perfect mirror of everything we used to be.
She looks at it. Then at me.
I wrap her wrist in gauze, eyes never leaving hers. The pressure in the room shifts—heavy, close, charged.
“All set,” I say, my voice rougher than I meant.
She takes a slow breath. “Thanks.”
She stands, closes the kit, slides it back intoher bag.
I stand too, and I catch her wrist—the unbandaged one.
I don’t even know what I meant to say. I just know that if she walks away, this moment goes with her, and I can’t let that happen.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
“I meant it that night,” I say finally. “I was coming back.”
Her eyes flicker—hurt, sharp, quickly swallowed.
“But you didn’t.”
Everything inside me tightens, heat surging up like a pressure bomb finally going off.
“And I’ve hated that night ever since,” I say.
I pull her into me and my mouth collides with hers—two years of restraint obliterated. It’s not gentle. Not careful. It’s what happens when you starve and finally get fed.
One hand cups her jaw. The other drags her against me as I spin her, pushing her back into the table.
She braces with one hand behind her. Her other hand threads into my hair at the nape of my neck, and she moans when I kiss her harder, tongue sliding against hers with the kind of abandon I’ve been denying since the moment she walked back into my life.
I’m starving.
